You could agree with his positions on atheism and religions but wish he would be a little more polite and tolerant of the sensitivities of religious people, or at least that he would refrain from criticizing that beloved icon, Mother Theresa:

Or you could take pleasure in his obvious enjoyment of language and learning, but just wish that he would be a little less sure of himself.

Hitchens was one of the greatest public intellectuals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, A man whose English breeding and education were evident with every word he spoke, but who became an American and embraced that identity.

I only ask one thing: if you do hear from the Catholic League, and they do try to adopt/convert you, fair's fair. Give them every chance to become an atheist, but don't show them the secret handshake until you're sure.

That's right, the Republicans have protected farmers against an imaginary regulation.

I guess that's better than spending their time on legislation that would actually do something, since we know how badly that comes up when Republicans get their way.

Or, to go to a more fertile hotbed of unreality, the right-wing talk radio.

You've undoubtedly heard something about President Obama's speech earlier this week (although, strangely enough, it seemed to get a lot less news coverage than what any number of Republicans said this week).

1. He is incontrovertibly correct.2. The people who believe in the assertion about the magical powers of cutting regulations and taxes, regardless of what they say, care nothing about what trickles down to poor people. As long as the rich are better off, that's literally all they care about.

But most importantly, we see that the only way Limbaugh was able to find to attack Obama's speech is by attacking the opposite of what Obama actually said. What we see time and again is that the Republicans are not only unaware of reality, they are actively hostile to it.

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Proof of Republican vote Suppression

One of the hotly contested areas in state legislation in recent years has been Republican attempts to create new, onerous identification requirements for voting and registering to vote. Republicans claim that all they are interested in is the integrity of our sacred ballot, while liberals and Democrats have pointed out that these efforts are no more than a thinly veiled attempt to prevent one of the most reliable Democratic voting blocks from voting.

For example, Attorney General Eric Holder has argued that voter suppression efforts are inconsistent with the values embedded in American democracy.

Evidence in a new case in Maryland proves that the Republican claims are the transparent lies we have argued they are, and that they have, in fact, been engaged in a systematic effort to keep black voters away from the polls.

Another page of handwritten notes from Rhonda Russell, who worked for the campaign, included the note “suppress turnout in Black communities”.

How do you defend the indefensible? Well, the Republican defendants claimed that the robocalls had nothing to do with suppressing black vote, it was just part of a “reverse psychology” strategy, whereby their calls to black voters would somehow motivate their white conservative base to get out to vote.

Of course, anyone who has worked on campaigns and knows about how they work knows that the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) effort is designed to make sure that identified supporters vote by calling them and reminding them to vote, not by calling people who you expect to support your opponent.

In other words, what we have argued for many years, racism in Republican efforts at vote suppression, has just been proved beyond a doubt.